The Rogue Astronaut

It started at the end, in more ways than one.

        

My whole life, I’d dreamed of going into space. Did everything to make that come true. When the call came through from NASA, I couldn’t stop smiling for weeks. Completed my training, boarded the shuttle, launched into space. Flew so high, into the stars, up to the International Space Station. Got there, to the point that my whole life had been building towards, to the moment I had dreamed of since I was a kid, and, heck, I was still basically just a kid. And that was that. Mission accomplished. Or so I thought.

        

Because that was the moment that everything changed.

Up in space, you get to see things differently. It puts everything in perspective. I could see the Earth, just floating there. It wasn’t everything, like you grow up thinking, you know? There’s so much more out there, all around us. We’re just clinging onto our planet’s surface, while a fucking huge universe goes on around us. We’re so tiny and insignificant, and the Earth is so ridiculously vulnerable.

        

Maybe something clicked in my head, like a switch turning itself on that had always been there. Or maybe I developed the capacity to care about the Earth there and then. Oh, I don’t know. But whatever caused me to change into someone new, to change my whole life, it happened right there.

        

I was looking at the Earth, at that little spinning sphere suspended in space (the pedant in me can’t help but point out it’s an oblate spheroid, but you know what I mean) and it started to change, right in front of me. It was like the continents peeled away, and the oceans disappeared, and I could see right inside it. And it was like a machine, all cogs and gears and turning mechanisms. I saw, for the first time, the Earth as a machine.

        

It was broken, and it needed to be fixed.

        

When I get back home, I told myself, I’m going to act. Suddenly I became aware of all those ‘green’ issues that the press write about, all those stories about the environment dying and nature being destabilised that no one really takes any notice of. Hell, I was just on a ship that blasted a hole in the fucking atmosphere! I certainly didn’t care back then. No one did.

        

People act like the world isn’t going to end because they think that it simply can’t, that it would be impossible, because the Earth is everything. But like I said, it’s not. If we kill the Earth, the rest of the universe won’t care. It’s our planet, to fuck up as we please.

        

Or we could save it.

        

I told my fellow astronauts about my epiphany (I didn’t give details, because I knew they wouldn’t believe me) and they nodded and smiled, but I could see they thought I’d gone mad or something. ‘Space Madness’ they called it in training. But I had been enlightened. I would have to persuade my colleagues – and the rest of the world.

        

It’s funny, really. I told you how I’d waited my whole life to get into space, right? Well, as soon as I had that epiphany, I couldn’t wait to get home. I climbed into the shuttle, and prepared for the voyage home. I was still wearing that grin on my face, but it wasn’t because of the now, because of being in space. It was because I knew I was going to change the future. 

*        *        *

I’ve always been good at fixing things, ever since I was a kid. My dad, God rest his soul, had a workshop at the end of the garden. It was only a squat little shed, not much more than a hovel or something, but he loved it. When he got home from work in the evenings, he would always go straight to his workshop and start working on things.

        

Eventually I realised that I needed to be in there too if I wanted any attention. (I don’t want you to think he was a bad father, and I don’t blame him for burying his head in trying to fix things – we had nothing else, basically.) So I watched and learned, and began to pick things up. I went in there wanting to spend time with my dad, and I came out better at fixing things than he was.

        

We made all sorts. If something in the house broke, we fixed it. If the neighbours needed something fixing, we did that too. I had a nice little income, when I was in my teens, repairing television sets and the like. Whatever needed to be done, I found out I could do it. It was almost natural, instinctual. People said I had a gift. Maybe I did.

        

Maybe that’s why I was chosen, by the Earth, if that’s what happened. Because the planet knew I would be able to see what needed to be done. If only it was as easy as it had been when I was a kid.

*        *        *

I’ve become almost a myth, a legend. Conspiracy theorists talk about me, so I’ve heard, over the Internet. I don’t know whether to be flattered or scared. To be honest, it’s a little bit of both.

        

I tried to talk, just like I told you I would. Preached to the world, told them about my vision, what I saw from up on high, how we needed to act, to change the world. To save the world. No one listened.

        

I spent the next few years dodging doctors and psychologists who seemed determined to lock me away. If people shut their problems away, force them out of sight, they think they just disappear. Newsflash: they really don’t.

        

I still don’t know how those ‘experts’ found me to quiz me about everything. They knew my addresses, past and present; they knew my phone numbers and those of my family. I’m convinced NASA had something to do with it, that they’re part of all this. I was bad press for them, wasn’t I? The rogue astronaut, the outspoken idiot spouting nonsense about the environment with a NASA badge on his chest.

        

Listen to me. Now I sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist.

        

So now I live in the woods, out of sight; for everyone else, out of mind too. I suppose, in a way, they’ve won. I don’t preach anymore. I don’t talk to anyone much. So they’ve silenced me, like they wanted to, but at least I have my freedom.

        

It’s nice out here, in the woods, miles from the city. Miles from anywhere at all, in fact. No pollution (well, nothing visible; it hasn’t disappeared from the atmosphere, of course, more’s the pity) and when I looked up to the sky at night I can see the stars. I remember myself up there, in the heavens, looking down on the Earth. But that seems so long ago.

        

I was a different man when I set off on that trip. Sometimes I wonder what that other me would be doing now, that ignorant idiot who believed what the papers said, that global warming was nothing much to worry about really, that the experts were sorting it out. Before the epiphany, I believed that. But I was stupid, and I see it now.

        

I see the Earth, as a machine. And it is broken.

        

Ah, I bet you’re thinking, what am I doing about it now? Because it’s all very well moaning and whinging, but if I do nothing about the problem I’m as bad as the oil barons and all those greedy, selfish fuckers. Almost.

        

Well, in my own small way, I’m doing something. I live a pollution-free existence, out here in the woods. I scavenge for food, and I built my own shelter. I get by. It’s easier now than it was when I started, when I was chased out of the city by everyone who said I was mad. But I would have chosen to come out here all along. This is where I need to be, where I belong.

        

There are some people who know I’m out here, like I said. People who read about me and my story, and wonder why I disappeared so fast. Sometimes they want to talk, and I invite them inside the cabin and sit them down and tell them about what I saw, up there in space. I walk them through the woods, showing them the trees, and telling them how I see them, as pieces of machinery, with the branches as cables, for example, all part of a greater whole. I tell them about the rain, as nuts and bolts falling from the sky; and I talk of solar energy made visible, as rivets and screws tumbling towards the Earth.

        

All these parts, to fix the broken machine, waiting to be harnessed.

        

It’s all here, I tell the strangers. The planet is giving us everything we need. Are we listening? Are we seeing it as we should? No, we just continue to fuck it up. The people listen intently to me. Some of them even write it down. They say they’ve enjoyed talking to me, that they’re going to take heed of everything I’ve told them. That they’ll spread the word but keep my existence secret. Now it’s my turn to nod and smile, because then they drive away, back to the city, in their gas-guzzling jeeps, and the exhaust fumes nearly choke me.

        

Once, when I hadn’t long been out in the woods and people had only just started to come and talk to me, I thought that these people were actually listening, that they truly cared. How fucking stupid and naïve of me! So I trekked back to the city to see what they had done.

        

I don’t know what I expected to find. A world changed? A whole new world, unrecognisable in its beauty and serenity, in perfect harmony with the Earth, as everyone shared my vision? Yeah, like that was ever going to happen. I took one look at the unchanged world and returned to the woods, and I cried myself to sleep that night.

        

I haven’t been back to the city since.

        

So I do my best to live a good life, with clean energy, or no energy at all, and be completely sustainable and self-sufficient, in my own little world amongst nature. And I think the Earth knows it.

        

It’s a clever machine, you see. It may be broken, but it can still see me, just as I can see it. Sometimes, when I listen really hard, I hear it whispering to me. The hum of power I hear in the trees becomes musical, and the pounding of machine parts on top of my shelter beats out a rhythm, and the rumbling from beneath the Earth, as the cogs whirr and grind, is a deep and heavy voice calling to me.

        

Do it, the voice says to me. Do it, do it, do it.

        

No one else would understand. My gift allows me to. Because I don’t just see the inner workings of the natural world. I look down at my own body, as I stand naked beneath the trees, in the middle of the woods, and I see the insides of me too. And like the Earth, my body is mechanical. Gears and cogs and parts – parts that could be given to the planet, to help repair it.

        

Do it, do it, do it NOW, NOW, NOW!

        

I know I should – I must. I take a gun to my head, and prepare to pull the trigger. In a small way, my body might help – it will help. This is how I will change the world.

        

I smile as I squeeze the trigger, and thank the Earth for my vision.

        

Now, finally, my mission is accomplished.

        

BANG!